May 20, 2011
Divisions Are Clear as Obama and Netanyahu Discuss Peace
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
WASHINGTON -- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel told President Obama on Friday that he shared his vision for a peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and then promptly listed a series of nonnegotiable conditions that have kept the two sides at an impasse for years.
Sitting at Mr. Obama's side in the Oval Office, leaning toward him and at times looking him directly in the eye, the Israeli leader bluntly rejected compromises of the sort Mr. Obama had outlined the day before in hopes of reviving a moribund peace process. Mr. Obama, who had sought to emphasize Israel's concerns in his remarks moments earlier, stared back.
In his public remarks, delivered after a meeting that lasted more than two hours, Mr. Netanyahu warned against "a peace based on illusions," seemingly leaving the prospect for new talks as remote as they have been since the last significant American push for peace collapsed last fall. Officials said that the meeting was productive, but that there were no plans for formal negotiations or any mechanisms in place to push the two sides forward.
Most significant among his public objections, Mr. Netanyahu said that Israel would not accept a return to the boundaries that existed before the war in 1967 gave it control of the West Bank and Gaza, calling them indefensible.
On Thursday, Mr. Obama said for the first time that those borders should to be the starting point for negotiations [1] to create a Palestinian state, though he emphasized that they would be adjusted to some degree through land swaps to account for Israeli settlements. Mr. Netanyahu simply ignored that nuance -- as did many conservative critics here in Washington -- further exacerbating tensions with the administration.
"Remember that before 1967, Israel was all of nine miles wide; it's half the width of the Washington Beltway," Mr. Netanyahu said. He was referring to the narrowest point between the West Bank and the Mediterranean Sea, north of Tel Aviv, while displaying a well-honed familiarity with American cultural references to make his point for an American audience. "These were not the boundaries of peace. They were the boundaries of repeated wars."
If Mr. Obama and his aides hoped his speech on Thursday would give fresh momentum to the peace process, Mr. Netanyahu's reaction -- first in an angry phone call Thursday to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and then face to face with the president a day later -- underscored why the conflict has long vexed presidential peacemaking.
"There was no expectation the outcome of the speech would be an immediate resumption of talks," a senior administration official said after the meeting. "It may take some time."
Mr. Obama did not back away from his proposals, despite harsh criticism from Israel's staunchest supporters, especially among Republicans, who accused the president of setting out a framework intended to force Israeli concessions.
But Mr. Obama went to length in his remarks on Friday to acknowledge Israel's security concerns and to emphasize what he called "the extraordinary bonds between our two countries." When Mr. Netanyahu called Mr. Obama "the leader of a great people" and then fumbled with his words after calling himself "the leader of a much smaller people," the president interrupted to correct him. "A great people," he said.
As he did in his remarks on Thursday, Mr. Obama called the region's turmoil "a moment of opportunity" to promote democracy and stability in the Middle East and North Africa, even as he acknowledged that "there are significant perils," reflecting a widely held perception in Israel that the events have made a peace settlement riskier than ever.
Mr. Obama received the political backing of the United Nations, the European Union and Russia, which with the United States are the international mediators overseeing efforts to end the conflict, known as the quartet. It issued a statement expressing "strong support for the vision of Israeli-Palestinian peace outlined" by Mr. Obama.
Mr. Obama has not directly discussed his new peace effort with the Palestinians, including the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, though lower-level American diplomats have. The Palestinian reaction has so far been relatively muted. Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for Mr. Abbas, issued a statement after Friday's meeting at the White House saying that Mr. Netanyahu's remarks amounted to "an official rejection of Mr. Obama's initiative, of international legitimacy and of international law."
Mr. Obama outlined his proposals in part to put the Israeli-Palestinian divide in the context of American support for democratic changes in the Arab world, but also to try to head off a worsening of the conflict as the Palestinians campaign to win recognition as an independent state at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September.
Mr. Obama warned that such steps would be little more than symbolic and could prove counterproductive. The meeting between him and Mr. Netanyahu -- their seventh since Mr. Obama took office in 2009 -- was scheduled to last less than an hour, but extended to more than double that.
After briefly meeting with their delegations, they broke off and met alone in the Oval Office for most of the time, eating together as they talked, instead of with their aides in a larger working lunch, as planned.
An Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, quoted Mr. Netanyahu as telling his aides: "I went in with certain concerns. I came out encouraged."
Publicly, Mr. Obama reassured Mr. Netanyahu that Israel's security would remain paramount in any American push to resolve the conflict.
"Our ultimate goal has to be a secure Israel state, a Jewish state, living side by side in peace and security with a contiguous, functioning and effective Palestinian state," Mr. Obama said. "Obviously there are some differences between us in the precise formulations and language, and that's going to happen between friends."
The president also joined the Israeli leader in raising concerns about Hamas, the militant faction that controls Gaza but recently agreed to reconcile with Fatah, which controls the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority. "Hamas has been, and is, an organization that has resorted to terror, that has refused to acknowledge Israel's right to exist," he said. "It is not a partner for a significant, realistic peace process."
Mr. Netanyahu characterized Hamas as "the Palestinian version of Al Qaeda" and flatly refused to hold any talks with the Palestinians if Hamas was included.
He also emphasized that Israel would not accept the return of Palestinian refugees to Israeli soil, an issue Mr. Obama had suggested should be deferred while the two sides worked on borders and security issues.
"Everybody knows it's not going to happen," Mr. Netanyahu said. "And I think it's time to tell the Palestinians forthrightly, it's not going to happen."
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/world/middleeast/20speech.html